The three busiest weeks of our year are also the three weeks people leave latest. Here is the calendar we actually work to.
Every year, on about the twenty sixth day of Ramadan, somebody rings and asks for sixty Eid gift boxes for the day after tomorrow. Every year the answer is no, and every year the person on the other end is genuinely surprised, because from the outside a bakery looks like a shop with things in it.
Here is the calendar we actually work to. Ramadan itself is quiet for cakes and busy for everything else. Orders move to the evening, deliveries move to the hours after Maghrib, and the kitchen runs on a different clock. We take fewer cakes in those weeks, not more, because baking through the day while fasting produces worse cake and there is no honest way around that.
The last ten days are gift box season. Boxes are individually made pieces, six to a box, and sixty boxes is three hundred and sixty pieces. That is three full days of work in a kitchen that is also making the birthday cakes that were promised in week two. So gift boxes need three weeks of notice, and the book for them closes at the start of the third week of Ramadan whether it is full or not.
Then Eid, when nothing leaves here for two days because everybody in this kitchen has family too, and then the fortnight after Eid, which is the busiest period of our entire year. That is wedding season. Every weekend is a wedding cake, and one wedding cake per weekend is the limit, so those weekends are usually gone by February. If your wedding is in the month after Eid and you are reading this in the same month, we are almost certainly full, and the right thing for us to do is say so quickly rather than hold you for a week.
What this means in practice. If you want a cake in Ramadan, a week's notice. If you want gift boxes, ask in the first ten days. If you want a wedding cake for the season after Eid, ask three months ahead and expect to be asked for a deposit to hold the weekend.
And if you have left it late anyway, ring rather than message. There is occasionally a gap, and the person who rings is the person who gets it.
